Latest Achievements

Updates about the latest accomplishments—including latest research, publications, and awards—by students, faculty, and staff

Submit an Achievement

Kamila Larripa, Mathematics

Kamila Larripa has been selected for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute's summer research program. She will work with collaborators on mathematical modeling of retinal degeneration while in residence.

Nievita Bueno Watts, INRSEP

Dr. Nievita Bueno Watts and Ezerom Yosief, student in the Department of Chemistry, presented their work entitled "Geoscience Alliance: A Visualization of the Decadal Growth of a Native American Mentoring Organization" at the American Geophysical Union conference on December 11, 2019.

Nievita Bueno Watts, INRSEP

Dr. Nievita Bueno Watts presented her talk entitled "Geoscience Alliance: Report on a Decade of Success of a Native American Mentoring Organization" as an invited speaker to the American geophysical Union conference on December 11, 2019.

Wyeth Wunderilch, Edward Davis, Jasper Oshun, Margaret Lang, Geology

Jasper Oshun and two HSU students presented at the American Geophysical Union Annual Conference in San Francisco. The work is part of a Geoscientists Without Borders Award directed by Jasper Oshun and Margaret Lang (ERE).
Wyeth Wunderlich (MS, Environmental Systems-Geology) presented a poster on water storage in high Andean wetlands.
Edward Davis (B.S. Geology, 2019) presented a poster on geophysical imaging of the subsurface of an Andean watershed.
Jasper Oshun presented a talk explaining the importance of bofedales, or peatlands, in sustaining flow in mountain catchments.

Alison Ruth Holmes, International Studies

Alison Holmes, Program Leader for International Studies, was invited by the Deputy Mayor for International Affairs for Los Angeles and the USC Center for Public Diplomacy to a private event on city and subnational diplomacy. She moderated a panel on practical challenges and discussed her recent work on California as a global actor.

Kerri J Malloy, Native American Studies

Kerri J. Malloy, Lecturer in Native American Studies, presented his paper "A Paradox of Transitional Justice: Settler Colonialism without Regime Change" at the Prevention Activism: Advancing Historical Dialogue in Post-Conflict Settings conference at Columbia University, New York City, December 12-14, 2019

Kerri Malloy, Native American Studies

Kerri J. Malloy, Lecturer in Native American Studies, presented his paper "A Paradox of Transitional Justice: Settler Colonialism without Regime Change" at the Prevention Activism: Advancing Historical Dialogue in Post-Conflict Settings
Historical Dialogues at justice at Columbia University, December 12-14, 2019.

Sarah Jaquette Ray, Environmental Studies

Dr. Ray was invited by the Walter Capps Center for Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at UC-Santa Barbara to give a talk on December 4 on "Coming of Age at the End of the World: An Existential Toolkit for the Climate Generation."

Katia G. Karadjova, Library

Librarian Katia Karadjova and the lead Brain Booth student assistant, Amelia Towse, were invited to present on "Recent Trends in Mindfulness and Contemplative Pedagogy in Higher Education" at the California Academic & Research Libraries (CARL) Annual Conference, April 1-3, 2020, Costa Mesa, CA.

Vincent Biondo, Religious Studies

Vincent Biondo presented "God, Data, and Michael Jordan: On the Border between Sport and Play," on Nov. 23, 2019 at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Sara Hart, Religious Studies

At the San Diego Convention Center on November 24, 2019, Dr. Sara Jaye Hart successfully presented her paper, "Semper Fidelis: The Popular Arts of the Challenge Coin, USMC Attire, and Combat Memoir," for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting.

Ellery Ames, Mathematics

Dr. Ellery Ames and collaborators Haakan Andreasson (Gothenburg University) and Oliver Rinne (HTW-Berlin) have been accepted to the Research in Pairs program at the Oberwolfach Institute for Mathematics.

Christina Hsu Accomando, English

Christina Hsu Accomando, Professor of English and Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies, served as the Contributing Editor for the 11th edition of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study (Worth Publishing, 2020), an interdisciplinary textbook used at HSU and across the U.S.  
https://store.macmillanlearning.com/us/product/Race-Class-and-Gender-in…

Christina Hsu Accomando, English

Christina Hsu Accomando, professor of English and Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies, presented on the roundtable "Exploring Feminist Pedagogy and Student Learning through the Lens of Threshold Concepts" at the National Women's Studies Association Conference in San Francisco on November 16, 2019.

Sam Sonntag, Politics

Sam Sonntag, Professor Emerita in the Department of Politics, co-edited The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya, recently published by Open Book Publishers, a non-profit, Open Access publisher based in Cambridge (UK) and run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. In addition to the introduction to the volume, Sonntag authored an historical analysis of language politics in Assam in Northeast India. The other chapters in the book cover language contact in Tibet and Nepal. The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya can be downloaded for free at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/980

Heather Madar, Art + Film

Heather Madar has been awarded a Hiob-Ludolf fellowship from the Herzog Ernst fellowship program at the Research Library Gotha in Gotha, Germany. The fellowship will support her research on Ottoman imagery in 17th century German court culture.

Tyler Evans, Mathematics

Dr. Tyler Evans and his co-author from ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary published their paper:

Cohomology of Restricted Filiform Lie Algebras ݔʎ»2(p),
Tyler J. Evans and Alice Fialowski, SIGMA 15 (2019), 095, 11 pages. arXiv:1901.07532 https://doi.org/10.3842/SIGMA.2019.095

Natalie Arroyo, Environmental Science & Management

Environmental Science & Management instructor and Eureka City Councilmember Natalie Arroyo will serve as a board member for the organization heading the Klamath River’s restoration, the governor’s office announced Friday.

Arroyo will be one of 15 board members serving the Klamath River Renewable Corporation, a nonprofit tasked with overseeing the removal of four Klamath dams. She is one of five board members appointed by the governor.

Read more: https://www.times-standard.com/2019/11/22/eurekas-natalie-arroyo-to-serve-on-klamath-river-restoration-nonprofit/

Dr. Renée M. Byrd, Sociology

Dr, Renée M. Byrd (Associate Professor, Sociology) presented on merging critical ethnic studies and environmental justice at the American Studies Assocation Annual Meetings in Honolulu November 8, 2019.

Bret McNamara, Jeff Kane, David Greene, Forestry, Fire & Rangeland Management

Former HSU Wildland Fire Lab graduate student, Bret McNamara (2018) published two research papers from his work on the rare Baker cypress.
One paper entitled “Strong dispersal limitation in postfire regeneration of Baker cypress, a rare serotinous conifer“ was published in the American Journal of Botany and the other paper entitled “Post-fire fuel succession in a rare California, USA closed-cone conifer” was published in Fire Ecology. These two papers were co-authored by Forestry and Wildland Resources faculty members, Jeff Kane and David Greene.

Leslie Rossman, Communication

Dr. Leslie Rossman has been appointed as the Lecturer Representative for the California Faculty Association. She continues her leadership as part of the state-wide work to support worker rights in the academy.

Devon Escoto and Sydney Verga , Communication

Devon Escoto and Sydney Verga advanced into the semi-final round (8/32) of Dominican University where they defeated UC Berkeley and the University of Alaska ending up in the final (4/32) for the weekend. This is the second time this year these two have advanced into elimination rounds, and their first finals appearance. They competed against two more teams from Berkeley and a team from the University of Miami Florida in the final, Berkeley won the event.

First-year student Carina Masters and her 2nd-year partner Tim Arceneaux just missed elimination rounds themselves. Every student who traveled spent approximately 7 hours over the weekend preparing and participating in debates. They debated reparations for slavery, the elimination of billionaires, the metaphor of "pain=gain" and more.

This is the second year in a row HSU has "broken" teams at Dominican. Since last year 6 different HSU students have seen elimination debate at this nationally competitive tournament.

Leslie Rossman , Communication

Dr. Leslie Rossman presented two papers at the National Communication Association Conference. One project was on the precarious nature of academic labor and the other paper was “Whose Survival? Limitations and Possibilities of Queer Imaginaries.”

Rosebelle Ines, Environmental Science & Management

Travel award recipient and research abstract accepted for presentation during the 2020 Emerging Researchers National (ERN) Conference in STEM, held in Washington, D.C., on February 6-8, 2020.

Sing C. Chew, Sociology

Professor Emeritus Sing C. Chew has a book in press entitled, Living Wisely in the Digital Dark Age: Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Ecology, and Life. This monograph is a follow-up to his three-volume work on World Ecological Degradation over 5,000 years of world history.

Peter Blickensderfer, Madison Kaisan, and Gabby Connors, Dance, Music & Theatre

Peter Blickensderfer, Madison Kaisan, and Gabby Connors won 1st Place, Best Experimental Film in the 29th Annual CSU Media Arts Festival. Filmmakers Madi and Peter collaborated with dancer/storyteller Gabby to create the spoken word experimental film Danh Tính. All three will graduate from HSU in May 2020 with BA Degrees in Film or Dance.

Kaitlin Reed, Native American Studies

Kaitlin Reed, Assistant Professor, Native American Studies, presented her paper “We Are A Part of the Land and the Land Is Us”: Settler Colonialism & Genocide in California at the California Indian Conference at Sonoma State University, November 14-16.

Dr. Sarita Ray Chaudhury, Business

Dr. Sarita Ray Chaudhury, School of Business, served as a Track Chair for the topic "Marketing Education" in the recently held Society for Marketing Advances Conference in New Orleans, LA from Nov 6-9th, 2019.

She also presented a study titled "Citizen-Consumers in Action: The Thunberg Effect in Addressing the Climate Crisis" with co-authors Dr. Pia Albinsson, Appalachian State University and Dr. Yasanthi Perera, Brock University, scheduled to be published in the conference proceedings.

More information on Dr. Ray Chaudhury's research can be found on Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=NyCG3WQAAAAJ

James Floss, Communication

James Floss, Emeritus Faculty from the Communication Department will present a series of workshops for students and faculty of the University Benito Juarez in Oaxaca, Mexico over the next two weeks. They are: Expression Dynamics, Writing a Better Oral Message and Dynamic Delivery of speeches.

Gil Trejo, Grace Hall, Melody Dick, Sean Fleming, Melissa Collin, Theresa Brakeman, Zach Porteous, Amy Rock, Nick Perdue,, Geography

GESA Faculty Amy Rock and Nick Perdue recently took geospatial students from several departments to the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) conference in Tacoma, WA, where they had the opportunity to get feedback on their maps and interact with mapping professionals from National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, NASA, and more.

Andrew Kinziger, Fisheries Biology

Andrew Kinziger and co-authors from the Redwood Sciences Lab published a peer reviewed paper in Environmental Biology of Fishes:

Kinziger, A.P., R.J. Nakamoto, A. Aguilar, B.C. Harvey. 2019. California roach (Hesperoleucus symmetricus) in the Eel River of northwestern California: native or introduced? Environmental Biology of Fishes 102:771–781. DOI
10.1007/s10641-019-00870-x [article]

Kerri J Malloy, Native American Studies

Kerri J. Malloy, Lecturer, Native American Studies was appointed to the Emerging Scholars Working Group of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. The Working Group members, as a whole and individually, provide input on policy briefings to the Advisory Board and Executive Committee of the association.

Steven Steinberg, Environmental Science & Management

Dr. Steve Steinberg, Adjunct Professor of Geospatial Sciences and Geographic Information officer for the County of Los Angeles, will be presenting a keynote address at the Smarter Data Smarter World Conference to be held at the British Library in London, England on November 19th.

His talk, titled “Addressing Collaboration through Innovation and Automation” discusses how the County of Los Angeles is using GIS to modernize its countywide address management system to ensure accurate, effective GIS-based management of addresses across the 88 cities and unincorporated county in support of government services for the 10.1 million residents of the County.

Kerri J. Malloy, Native American Studies

Kerri J. Malloy, Lecturer, Native American Studies presented his paper "In Plain Sight but Unseen: Healing in Northwestern California" at the Building Sustainable Peace conference sponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, November 7-10.

Deepti Chatti, Environmental Studies Program

Deepti Chatti, Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program has been elected to be an At-Large Councilor for the Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).

Deepti Chatti, Environmental Studies Program

Deepti Chatti, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, is the Principal Investigator for a grant from the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative at Duke University. The project is called "Researching Refills", and studies the resources and relationships required by rural families in India to sustain clean energy access.

Mark Colwell, Matt Lau, Lizzie Feucht, Jeremy Pohlman, Wildlife

Mark Colwell and co-authors published a paper in Wader Study, an international journal dedicated to shorebird ecology and conservation. Their work culminates 20 yrs of research on Snowy Plovers in coastal northern California, and shows that plovers prefer to breed on wide ocean-fronting beaches; however, the reproductive success of plovers in these habitats is often compromised by the presence of Common Ravens (which eat plover eggs and chicks) and humans.

Susan Marshall and Joe Seney, Forestry, Fire & Rangeland Management

Humboldt State University Wins 2nd place in Region 6 Collegiate Soil Contest, Nov. 2
Five universities sent teams to describe colors, textures, and appropriate uses of soils during the Region 6 Collegiate Soil Competition, hosted by Humboldt State University's program in Rangeland Resources and Wildland Soils. HSU is among only five universities in California offering sufficient coursework to qualify graduates to become federally recognized Soil Scientists. Participating universities included Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CSU Chico, CSU Fresno, Humboldt State University, and New Mexico State University. The top three teams (CalPoly San Luis Obispo, Humboldt State University, and New Mexico Stat

Amelia G. McArthur (undergraduate researcher) and Robert W. Zoellner (Professor of Chemistry), Chemistry

Amelia G. McArthur (undergraduate researcher) and Robert W. Zoellner, Ph.D. (Professor Emeritus of Chemistry) have published a peer-reviewed article entitled “Chlorates and perchlorates as potential high-energy materials: Chlorate- and perchlorate-substituted methanes” in the peer-reviewed, open-source journal “Heliyon” 2019, volume 5, issue 10, e02686 (7 pp).

Kyle D. McNamara, B.S. (recent graduate) and Robert W. Zoellner, Ph.D. (Professor of Chemistry), Chemistry

Kyle D. McNamara, B.S., (recent HSU graduate) and Robert W. Zoellner, Ph.D. (Professor Emeritus of Chemistry) have published a peer-reviewed article entitled "The effects of substituent position and orientation on the structures and dipole moments of the cyanocyclohexanes using density functional theory calculations" in the journal "Computational and Theoretical Chemistry" volume 1170, 15 December 2019, 112622 (8 pp).

Kim Vincent-Layton, Armeda Reitzel, Becky Williams, Center for Teaching and Learning

Kim Vincent-Layton, Educational Developer, CTL, Dr. Armeda Reitzel, Professor, Communication, and Becky Williams, Canvas Admin, CTL presented "Data at Your Fingertips: Supporting the Success of All Learners" at the Can•Innovate Online Conference, October 25, 2019

Justus Ortega, School of Applied Health

Justus Ortega, Professor of Kinesiology, and co-authors have published two papers entitled "Relationship Between the King-Devick Test and Commonly Used Concussion Tests at Baseline" and "King-Devick Test Reliability in National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletes: A National Collegiate Athletic Association–Department of Defense Concussion Assessment, Research and Education" in the Journal of Athletic Training.

Ellery Ames, Mathematics

Ellery Ames, Lecturer in Mathematics, jointly with co-authors Florian Beyer, (University of Otago, NZ) and Jim Isenberg (Univ. of Oregon) published a paper entitled "Contracting asymptotics of the linearized lapse-scalar field sub-system of the Einstein-scalar field equations" in the Journal of Mathematical Physics. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5115104

Vincent Biondo, Religious Studies

Vincent Biondo has accepted an appointment to the American Academy of Religion Public Understanding of Religion Committee where he will meet with senior officials in the White House, State Department, the museum of African American History & Culture, the National Museum of American History, the Holocaust Museum, and the Museum of the Bible, among other responsibilities.

Michael Sutter and Andrew Kinziger, Fisheries Biology

Fisheries Biology graduate student Michael Sutter published his thesis in Conservation Genetics. Michael's MS mentor was Dr. Andrew Kinziger.

Sutter, M., and A.P. Kinziger. 2019. Rangewide tidewater goby occupancy survey using environmental DNA. Conservation Genetics 20:597-613. doi: 10.1007/s10592-019-01161-9

Karen Davy, Music

Karen Davy presented a session on the work of her former violin teacher, Kató Havas, at the ASTA Oregon Biennial meeting at Pacific University on Oct. 5.

Thomas Starkey-Owens, Environmental Science & Management

ESM graduate student Thomas Starkey-Owens gave a presentation of his Masters research at the 2019 American Fisheries Society (AFS) meeting in Reno, Nevada entitled "Benthic macroinvertebrate communities and juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) diet on the Trinity River below Lewiston Dam."

Alison O'Dowd, Environmental Science & Management

ESM Professor Alison O'Dowd and co-authors published a paper entitled, "Interacting geomorphic and ecological response of step-pool streams after wildfire" in the Sept/Oct 2019 issue of the Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1130/B35049.1

Fisheries Biology Faculty and Students, Fisheries Biology

Seven undergraduate, six graduate, and five faculty from the Department of Fisheries Biology attended the National American Fisheries Society meeting in Reno, Nevada (29 Sept – 4 Oct). HSU Fisheries contributed eight research presentations, three posters, and moderated four sessions. The event included an HSU Fisheries Alumni and Friends Social.
Presenters
Michael Academia - Prey composition and relationship between nesting success and food provisioning of osperys in northwestern California
Andrew Kinziger - Genetic analysis suggests Catostomus rimiculus (Klamath smallscale sucker) in the Smith River, California are introduced
Max Grezlik - An ecosystem model to facilitate ecosystem-base

Alison O'Dowd, Environmental Science & Management

Alison O’Dowd was awarded a grant from the National Parks Service to fund a student internship program with Redwood National Park.